Film and TV Reviews

The Grand Tour viewers received their second installment today and I must say that it did not disappoint. To see the review of episode 1, click here.

If you loved the classic silliness and shenanigans of the old school Top Gear, then you will love this episode. It is unlike episode 1, which was out to please the real car fanatics, which is fair enough, this is a motoring show after all. This episode is purely about the banter and comedy between the trio, with a couple of nice cars thrown in here and there. I view this as a positive as I love their humour and chemistry, but I can imagine some petrol heads getting a little tired of this.

There was a lot of chuckling throughout the episode, myself and the presenters included. A couple of controversial jokes were thrown in, nothing too cringy or embarrassing, but it really felt like Jeremy Clarkson was getting back into the swing of things.

One thing I am not keen on is the American racing driver (The Stig replacement). His humour doesn’t fit in well with the British wit and I have not warmed to him at all. Also they had another section where they killed off a so-called celebrity, which was slightly cheesy, a bit scripted and repetitive for my taste.

I did however enjoy the audience participation much more in this episode. The presenters interacted with the audience and it was very funny! They were not over the top like last week and the banter flowing back and forth between the South Africans and the 3 Brits was very amusing!

A great deal of the show was totally unrelated to cars. Clarkson, Hammond and May were dressed as soldiers and had to carry out a mission. It was carried out in Tom Cruise’s ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ style, every time they ‘died’ they would have to start from the beginning. It was very funny, tongue and cheek and the visual humour worked well. They even recognised themselves, that no cars had been seen for 10 minutes and that they should drive one as “it is a car show”.

The lack of cars did not bother me in the slightest. There was some eye candy for the car lovers in spectacularly filmed shots. This episode seemed to go a lot faster than the previous and left me more than excited for next weeks installment. I reward this episode 4/5 stars. ★★★★★